A West Village resident recently told me, “George, I just got this crazy call that I had won money and all I had to do was go down to Rite-Aid…[S]omebody was waiting to give me a check if I would just pay him.”
She gave me a number and I called it and reached a guy with an accent. I explained that I was a member of the press and wanted to know about his scam.
We verbally circled for a few minutes and then he admitted that he worked for a scam operation in Nigeria. He said that they made millions a year and couldn’t be traced because they used a ‘burner phone.’ “What’s a burner phone?” I asked. He offered that it was a phone that “burned” the number at the end of the conversation so that they could not be traced.
“I got to get off the phone. My supervisor wants me to make money,” he interrupted. “Let me talk to the supervisor,” I asked and he handed over the phone. However, the supervisor’s Nigerian accent was so thick that I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Finally, I got a call back from the press office of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). They are hard to get on the phone but they are the nicest press officers you will find—they speak English. The officer repeated what I had heard before, that it was still hard to stop robocalls and when you get one to just hang up. Don’t try to be a smarty-pants like me and tell off the robosalesman; they will capture your phone number and sell it.
The FCC press officer also told me that the FBI had nabbed 70 phone crooks and successfully prosecuted them. He also admitted that even he gets robocalls and that it was a big problem. So when you get one, just hang up.
(Oh, before calling me back, the FCC press officer checked out WestView and, when pressed, said, “Nice.”)
— George Capsis
